Manuscripts section

The manuscripts

Manuscripts are books written by hand (manu-scriptum), and the very fact that they are written by hand makes them fundamentally different from printed books. Each book is the result of a vast number of individual decisions, reflecting the time and circumstance of the maker and/or commissioner of the book: its style and format, its content, its execution, etcetera.

In scholarly books (books produced for schools, private study or specifically for use at medieval universities) the imprint of the user of a book is often very recognizable: the page offer ample space for notes that can be added to the text, and these notes are rich sources of information of how texts were read, used and processed by their readers.

In this section, we use the manuscripts as looking glasses to see the ways in which texts were used and worked with.